Showing results by narrator "Noah Levine" in All Categories

After a tour of combat abroad, a young man determined to keep to himself is drawn into the dramas of his East Village neighbors. World War II veteran Richard Stone is attempting to transition back into normal life. An aspiring writer, he’s surviving off the GI Bill and the help of friends. Living free of attachments and responsibilities, he thinks, is the best way to defend himself from the world’s pain, like his unhappy upbringing or his best friend’s death in the war. But his neighborhood on Second Avenue won’t permit such seclusion.

Did Marco Polo bring pasta back from China, or is that a myth? How did the Neapolitan "macharoni" turn into the ubiquitous spaghetti? Is it even an Italian dish? Hundreds of shapes and thousands of recipes give expression to the culture and products of the country's regions. But spaghetti with tomato sauce remains Italy's identity dish par excellence. Massimo Montanari goes in search of the dish's true origins, tracing its history along the multiple, intricate routes taken by its raw ingredients to merge and become a distinctive element of culinary tradition.

For Paul Tomenko, relocating trillions upon trillions of life forms on Earth to the Paraverse wasn’t all that difficult. So easy, in fact, that he does it in his sleep. After slipping into a coma, Paul uses his latent divine knowledge to create the Paraverse while imagining 50 more years of continued life on Earth. Then he dumps—no pun intended—an incalculable number of souls residing in his lower intestinal tract into the new domain with the simplicity of a bowel movement. But preserving the promise of eternal existence comes with a cost.